Thursday Night sickness struck my team, and struck hard. Several members of my team had fallen sick on Wednesday and Thursday morning, but I was happy to find myself still in the group of healthy team members. That was short lived.
At 10pm I was laying in bed, writing a letter to my beautiful friend Jen, when I started feeling not so awesome. All in my head, I convinced myself, no Emily, you're just feeling sick because you've been around it. It's all in your head.
I went downstairs and sipped some water. One of my teammates was sitting in the living room watching Tangled. No big deal, I'll just watch Tangled and let this feeling pass. Right?
Wrong.
Rapunzel didn't even make it out of her tower before I was running to the sink to throw up everything I had eaten that day. No big deal though. Quite a few of my teammates had thrown up once or twice, then they were fine. It was probably something I ate. Right?
Wrong.
One other girl on my team, the other Emily, was struck with the sickness bug at essentially the same time. We took turns stepping over people trying to sleep in our room, fighting for the bathroom, trying not to throw up in the room. Eventually due to the efforts of sharing the bathroom, and the sheer exhaustion of being sick and running a fever we just retreated downstairs with a bucket each.
Let me paint this picture for you. There is no air conditioning downstairs, which is a little more than uncomfortable when you're not running a high fever. Its downright torture when you are. There is one oscillating fan that we were fighting for. Tangled was still close to the beginning so we halfway watched it, thankful for some form of distraction.
Emily and I were practically in sync. Every 20 minutes or so she'd throw up, then I'd throw up. If we moved, we threw up. If we drank anything, we threw up. When Tangled finished, neither one of us had the energy to stand up and change the movie, so it automatically restarted, and we watched it all the way through a second time.
Around 2am, as the opening credits of Tangled were playing a third time one of our teammates came down, filled our water bottles, made sure we were as comfortable as you can be in that situation, and changed the movie.
By this point I was trying to tactic of just lying face down on the marble floor. There was nothing in my stomach, but I was still throwing up, or at least my body was trying. I didn't have energy to move. I wanted desperately for it to just be morning, night time just makes situations seem that much more dismal.
By about 6am the sickness slowed from twice an hour, to once an hour, then once every few hours, and I was finally able to get some sleep. One of the nurses from the home sent over hydration drinks (really disgusting salty apple juice) but if I'm honest they helped immensely.
I can honestly say I've never been so sick in my life. Ever. Over the course of 12 hours I threw up 17 times. It was one of the longest, and hardest nights of my life. There were times when I really questioned whether I was going to make it out of India. That may sound dramatic, but the other Emily will attest, it was that rough of a night.
It's Sunday morning now. Several cartons of salty apple juice, quite a few episodes of Dr. Who (thanks Megan!) and plenty of sleep later I'm at about 90% health. It was a rough rough night, but I'm glad that Emily and I struggled through together, entirely alone would have been unbearable. We definitely bonded in some pretty real, and disgusting ways.
Oh and in case you're wondering, I plan to pretty much never watched Tangled again. It's been well and truly ruined for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment